PERRIE Edwards returned to the stage today to perform after opening up about having two miscarriages.
The 32-year-old looked amazing in a Western inspired black outfit, complete with silver tassles, as she belted out tunes in her hometown Newcastle for the Come Together Festival.
The Little Mix singer is gearing up to release her new single If He Wanted To He Would and her debut solo album.
It comes after she revealed for the first time she had two miscarriages, describing the most recent as the “worst day of my life”.
Speaking on the We Need To Talk podcast with Paul C Brunson, Perrie said her first miscarriage before the birth of her son Axel in 2021, occurred very early in the pregnancy.
“I remember finding out I was pregnant. Obviously, I started bleeding not long after, and I went to hospital and I had the scan and they were like, ‘There’s no baby.’
“And I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve made this up. Maybe I got a false positive or something’.
“I remember being on my own at the appointments.”
She went on to describe Axel – her son with fiance Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, a former England footballer – as her “rainbow baby”, a term for a child born after pregnancy loss.
Less than a year after Axel’s birth, she became pregnant again.
“I was rehearsing for the last Little Mix tour, and I thought, ‘I don’t feel good’. Every symptom under the sun. I was like, ‘I think I’m pregnant,’” she said.
But by 24 weeks, after Edwards had started planning the nursery, doctors told the couple the baby had no heartbeat, in what the singer said was the “worst day of my life”.
She said: “It’s weird, because the first time it happened, I think because it was so early, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s hard’.
“But I think when you’re 24 weeks and you’ve planned out that room and all these things, it’s really hard. And nobody knows other than immediate friends and family.”
Perrie, from South Shields in Tyneside, has been with former Liverpool and Arsenal midfielder Oxlade-Chamberlain since 2017 and they became engaged in 2022, the same year Little Mix went on hiatus and around the time she suffered her second miscarriage.
The group also included Leigh-Anne Pinnock, Jesy Nelson and Jade Thirlwall.
What is miscarriage and why do pregnancies fail?
MISCARRIAGE is generally the death of an unborn baby in the first 24 weeks – approximately six months – of pregnancy.
Miscarriages may not be spoken about a lot but they are very common. Baby loss charity Tommy’s estimates there are at least 250,000 per year in the UK and that one in every five pregnancies ends in miscarriage.
It may not be clear why a miscarriage happens but they are rarely caused by anything done by the mother or father. Usually the embryo has a random genetic defect that means it cannot develop properly.
Most women can go on to successfully have healthy babies in the future.
The NHS says most miscarriages cannot be prevented but avoiding smoking, alcohol and drugs while pregnant can reduce the risk.
Some of the other most common reasons for a pregnancy to fail in the first 24 weeks are ectopic pregnancy and molar pregnancy.
Ectopic pregnancy is where a fertilised egg implants somewhere outside of the womb, usually in a fallopian tube. It cannot survive and grow there so either dies naturally or must be terminated.
Molar pregnancy is rarer but happens when a fertilised egg and/or placenta does not develop properly at the start of a pregnancy. There is no single reason why it happens and cannot be prevented, though it may be more common in very young or old mothers.
A baby who dies after 24 weeks is considered a stillbirth.
Source: NHS